I would note that if the teen affiliation rates are anything to go by, chances are that half of those 33% (17%) would become Catholic, 3/10th Mainline (10%) and only 1/5th Evangelical (7%). This of course still ignores the number that convert to non-Christian religions.
But you are right, we should be looking at inflows as well as outflows.
These flows will change over time of course. Trends in retention will have a big impact (see the chart I posted previously). As will changes to number of converts. Again, if the teen afilliation rates are anything to go by, the biggest source for converts for Evangelicals are Mainlines, for Mainlines, Evangelicals, for Catholics, Unaffiliateds, with Unaffiliateds drawing large numbers from all three.
This may mean that, when the Mainline exodus dries up, and given its downward retention rate trend, the slow drop in Evangelicals accelerates. The prognosis for Catholics is no better, if a bit more murky (Unaffiliateds, its main source of converts, is growing but that groups retention rate is also improving).
People may notice that my last post cited âthe slow drop in Evangelicalsâ, which might seem to be contradicted by the Pew chart contained in that post. That chart was based on 2014 data, which showed a small increase in Evangelicals. The 2016 PRRI/RNS chart showed a small decrease in white evangelicals (probably at least partially offset by more steady non-white numbers, but the chart did not split these up by tradition). Finally the 2019 Pew chart I posted a few posts ago shows a small (but larger) decrease.
How fast is the situation changing? The following is a Pew forecast, apparently based on 2010 data (but appearing to be published in 2015):
You may notice that it predicts a 2050 Unaffiliated figure of 25.6%.
However Pew data from 2019 shows that Unaffiliateds had already reached 26%, 31 years early (an apparent 4-fold acceleration of the predicted trend).
I am looking forward to seeing Pew results for 2020. I think that 2020 will be a transformational year for all world religions both worldwide and in the United States due to way the world adapts to COVID. What I am seeing locally is older mainline churches closing premanently and leaving property to decay and those that have gone to online services only have seen 66% reduction in collections. With the money drying up, many churches will find it hard to servive. Many took PPP loans from the government to keep employees to July 31, but now are laying off employees who do things as clean the building and mow the lawns.
Itâd be interesting to see what, if any, effect the current situation has. My assumption is times of crisis tend to increase the reliance of the irrational and superstitious as a source of reassurance. But I have no idea if that is the case.
Then why is that almost all the churches that I know of that have large, vibrant youth groups (teens and/or young adults), and where there are enough youngish parents (parents with kids still in school years) to help out with a full range of grades in Sunday school and with nursery duty, tend to be Baptist, Gospel, Alliance, etc., and not Episcopalian, Methodist, etc.? I donât deny that even evangelical churchgoing is dropping off (though not as drastically as that of the liberal mainstream churches), but youâre still far more likely to find a Sunday school with a full range of grades, or a church with specially hired youth pastors, in an evangelical than in traditional blue-blood church. Sure, there are Baptist churches with smaller, older congregations. But parents moving to a new town and looking for a church where their children and teenagers will have rich and interesting child and teen programs tend to find that the preponderance of such churches lean in evangelical, pentecostal, or fundamentalist directions.
Eddie, Iâm not really interested in your anecdotal experiences (nor for that matter why you really really donât like liberal churches ad nauseam). Iâm interested in what can be demonstrated objectively.
Iâm simply reporting what one Pew chart said. It is supported by the 2016 PRRI âGenerational Shiftâ chart (which shows White Evangelicals heavily weighted towards older age groups).
Iâve since also tracked down a Pew chart that shows aggregate median ages by tradition ( https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/05/PR_15.05.12_RLS_chapter3-00.png ). It shows that the median age of Evangelicals was 49 in 2014, only 3 years younger than the Mainline median. It also shows that both groupsâ median age increased by 2 years since 2007.
I cannot tell you which cognitive biases are telling you that Evangelicals are younger than this, but there are a number of them that make it quite easy to get a skewed impression. Thatâs why we should rely on statistics rather than personal impressions.
Of course, you have no ability to use personal impressions, since you donât darken the doorway of churches, do you? The actual on-the-ground life of churches â which are not going to be adequately captured in crude measurements like surveys â are terra incognita to many of the people posting here. When was the last time Faizal, Tim Horton, Roy, etc. spent any significant amount of time visiting a wide variety of Protestant churches in their cities and observing the numbers, the dynamics, the levels of youth participation, etc.? Perhaps Steve Mathesonâs memories of actual participation in Christian life are recent enough for him to have some idea. I get the impression that the participation in Christian life of several others here was long in the past, maybe decades in the past, and that the participation level of others has ranged from very, very little to zero. Statistics, unbalanced with flesh-and-blood encounters with the lived reality of the churches, can never give a full or nuanced picture.
Itâs true that even evangelical churches are facing challenges today, but they are still on average more spiritually lively than their âestablishmentâ counterparts. They do have a hope of turning things around, whereas the big traditional churches are fading into oblivion no matter what they do.
I walk by 12 churches every Sunday morning - Baptist (1st and 2nd), Methodist, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, three Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Assembly of God, Jehovah Witness. All are now empty and closed. COVID is killing the organized religion in the US. Big decrease in members and donations.
Although this is also mere anecdotal evidence of the sort that âEddieâ is proffering. Where I live, restaurants, bars and retail stores are also struggling, but that does not demonstrate an overall loss of interest in those things.
It showed me what any awake person should be able to know on honest reflection: lots of evangelicals are wonderful people who want to make the world better; lots of other evangelicals are just confused people trying to find their way; lots of the rest are troubled and some of those are sociopathic. All evangelicals are in churches that struggle to tell the truth about the bible.
Even at my most fervent, I never let my faith cause me to attempt to trump data with my experience. Thatâs a sign of intellectual decay.
This is the beginning of a post that suggests absence from intellectual standards of thought and discourse. Itâs not the rudeness. Itâs the departure from reason that an appeal to your experience requires. I have enough respect for you to be mildly shocked by this.
I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that @Patrick was commenting on the likelihood that the pandemic will harm churches significantly, and that he wasnât trying to claim that their emptiness implied a âloss of interest.â It will be VERY interesting to see how things turn out. I was initially enthusiastic about the possibility that the pandemic would cause mass extinction of churches, and I still think that could be an overall positive outcome. But my years of involvement in a humanist community taught me just how hard it is to create a congregation, and just how valuable that can be, and so I think that mass extinction of churches would be really hard on a lot of people, at least at first.
Regarding the ârudenessâ you are talking about, I wasnât addressing you, but Tim, who is speaking about the living faith of current Protestants without â it seems â any insider experience, which is quite irritating. It happens a lot here, actually. And my point stands: outsiders to religion, who know nothing or next to nothing, about what actually goes on inside evangelical or non-evangelical churches, shouldnât be treating surveys as if they give a complete picture of whatâs going on. Iâve been supplying my insiderâs knowledge of what goes on. Youâd think Tim would be willing to learn something from someone who is on-site, to supplement the learning that comes from a sociology professorâs surveys.
If others want to discount my experience as worthless, they can. But the implication that I am incapable of as simple an intellectual operation as counting â and thus determining that Sunday schools and youth groups are comparatively large in most evangelical churches in my area, and tiny to non-existent in the mainstream churches in my area is, if not ârudeâ, certainly insulting.
As always here, Iâve been willing to concede a point â yes, even evangelical churches are seeing drops in numbers, as the surveys show. Iâve said that already. But has any atheist here conceded any of my points? No, of course, Iâm always completely wrong. Not a single thing I said about the current state of Protestant Christianity has any value or insight. Has any atheist here said anything like: âMuch of your analysis I can agree with, but I donât agree with you about claim X?â No, thatâs not the style around here. You know that. If anyone who is identified as either ID or creationist says anything here, blazing guns flame at them from all directions. On any point they make.
You used to complain that Uncommon Descent was like a cesspool. Do you not see how conservative Christians visiting this site could arrive at a similar conclusion, based on the tone and attitude with which their contributions are met? And atheist cesspools are just as stinky and unwholesome as ultra-conservative ones.
But letâs change the topic. Have you ever written a biographical account of the reasons which led you to abandon what once seemed to be a firm Reformed faith for unbelief? I think a new topic on that subject might be interesting to many.
Letâs try and cut @Eddie some slack. After all, he has taken more than 7 semesters of advanced math, including statistics. And a whole lot more applied math (at least another 6 semesters worth). Surely he has some comprehension of the difference between his approach here and @Timâs contributions.
Edward, Edward, Edward â what am I to do with you? I should not have to explain this to any reasonable person (so youâll have to forgive me if I treat you as somewhat less-than-reasonable), but here goes.
There are approximately 80 million Evangelicals in the US. How many of them do you know personally? 0.1% (8,000) would seem a reasonable upper bound. With such a small fraction, you are in no position to know whether this small fraction is a representative sample. This means that, in spite of your sophomoric digs, youâre in only slightly better a position than my 0%. And although I donât know any Evangelicals personally, I see quite enough of their antics on the likes of Warren Throckmortonâs blog and Right Wing Watch to be thankful that the vast majority of them are on the other side of the world from me.
Even beyond this, you would need to convince me that your impression is not biased towards the most visible, active and/or vocal of the Evangelicals in your local area. We all tend to remember those that actively catch our eye, rather than than the quiet one in the corner.
Further, you are I take it a gentleman of fairly mature years? As one gets older it gets harder to accurately differentiate the ages of people quite a bit younger (just as it is harder for younger people to accurate differentiate the age of those much older). Are you certain that you can accurately and reliably differentiate between people in their 20s from their 30s, and 30s from their 40s?
These are just the obvious potential biases that immediately come to mind. They should give any reasonable person pause before making sweeping judgements based merely upon personal experience.
But beyond that, should I trust your personal judgement Edward? When somebody flings around adjectives like âfoppishâ and âperfunctoryâ about a rival religious group, and is quick to call their beliefs ânearly vacuousâ, it does tell me something. But that something is about the speaker, not the target of their vitriol. And what it tells me is not good.
Well, itâs not exactly clear from his recent pronouncements that he attended the lectures on Sampling Theory. That topic is, admittedly, not advanced math, but it is a crucial underpinning of any working understanding of Statistics.
Addendum:
I might be more willing to do so if Eddie showed any inclination to cut others any slack â e.g. Liberal Christian Traditions on this thread, Evolutionary Biologists and Climate Scientists on others. Add to that his attitude on this thread has become more derisory as his own position has become more blatantly untenable.
Iâve never done that. Why would I? I do know that church attendance locally has recently been considerably reduced, and am aware that anyone who attempts to use any 2020 (anec)data on church attendance is likely to be a charlatan.
I do wonder why my name is being invoked in a discussion of foreign churches in which Iâve not participated.
